Healing After the Charleston Church Shooting

I am Reverend Sharon Risher. I’m an associate minister, used-to-be chaplain, I’m a mother, I’m an aunt, I’m a friend. I’m just regular, everyday people.

On June 17th, a young white male, who was fueled by his white supremacist ideology, walked into Emmanuel AME church, and decided, after months of preparation, that he was going into that church to kill as many people as he could.

They welcomed him into the Bible study. He sat among them, hearing the Word of God from the Gospel of Mark, chapter four. Once they were finished, they all gathered in a circle holding hands with their eyes bowed, listening to prayer, and that’s when he pulled out his .45 Glock.

I found out about what was going on in Charleston through circumstance. I called my nephew, and he said, “Auntie, something’s happened. We are down at the church; they won’t tell us what’s going on, but we know something bad has happened.”

He said, “They’ve taken someone to the hospital, so we’re going to go over to the hospital. Maybe that’s where Granny is.”

I learned that Mama had been killed when the FBI chaplain called me in Dallas, and said, “Reverend Risher, we hate to tell you that your mother was one of the nine in the church.” I don’t even think I finished the conversation with her. I dropped the phone and immediately started screaming.

To hear my sister say on the news that she forgave the killer, there was another time of primal scream that came out of my body. To even have the thought of wanting to say you would forgive the person that killed our mother.

Now I knew my sister was a woman of faith, but in my mind, maybe I was judging her a little, I don’t know, but I just didn’t realize that her faith was at that level where she could give instant forgiveness to somebody that had just horrifically killed nine people. Our mother, our two cousins, one of my childhood friends, so not only did I lose my mother, I lost people that were significant in my life.

At a time I was angry at God, still understanding that God didn’t make this happen, but who else are you going to lash out to? Who else could I let all of that anger and rage out to that was not going to judge me? So yes, I was very angry. Sometimes I prayed all day, and other days I didn’t want to hear the word “God.”

Healing for me came slow. It came very slow, it came…it was like God said, “I’m going to let you do what you do, but I’m here. And I know in the midst of all of this, that you are my child, and you’re going to come back to me.”

To sit through the trial, to me, I would put on my armor, and I would put on that mindset of, this is a job. This is what I need to do to represent my mother and the others. But that was some of the hardest days I spent in a courtroom, to listen to everything that they had to say, to see the autopsy reports, and see the figure and where the bullets hit her body. All of those things [exhales].

But the families, because we were packed into this, when anybody started to get emotional, you would feel a hand grab you or you would feel somebody behind you put a hand on your shoulder and squeeze your shoulder. And so we got through that trial as a family. Because nobody knew what we were going through except us.

October 1st, 2017, I was preaching, and the word “forgiveness” was not even in my sermon because I made sure that I didn’t use those type of words. And that Sunday, the word “forgiveness” came out my mouth. And it was like this warm kind of feeling, and it was like God was saying, “Okay, you have done the work. It’s time for you to free yourself of this. I’m here for you; you could be free.” And I just said, “I forgive you.”

God was saying, “I am calling you out to a new ministry, a ministry that people need to know about how gun violence has become a crisis in this country, and I’m going to give you this hard task, because you’re built for this, I know you could do this, being a gun violence advocate, now author, public speaker, all of these things is what makes Sharon Sharon now. And I thank God for seeing that this little geechee girl from Charleston, South Carolina, that God was preparing me for such a time as this.

And that’s where the title of the book came from, because I’d used that phrase a lot. Just never thinking that it really meant something in my life, that that phrase would be the hashtag for the rest of my life.